which were also adapted for TV, but Sex and the City remains Bushnell’s most feted accomplishment. The
last offering, Sex and the City 2, came out almost a decade ago, but rumours of sequels still swirl, alleged
feuds between castmates make headlines, and, as Bushnell pointed out, those Instagram accounts are
flourishing. “I’ve seen Carrie Bradshaw in a beer commercial,” she says of her alter ego protagonist, talking
with the nonchalance of an artist who relinquished control of their art long ago. “The characters have
stepped into another dimension, they’re not anchored to real life.”
But real life was where it began. As a columnist, Bushnell turned flings and friendships into sparkling copy,
using shrewd social commentary to confront the rigid sexual politics that defined Manhattan’s dating scene
in the mid-Nineties. In this pre-Tinder era, men came and went in tribes – “modellisers” (only sleep with
models), freaks (steal secondhand books) and “fuck buddies” (no explanation needed) – while women called
the shots and wore expensive shoes. The HBO programme, which ran from 1998 to 2004, was praised for
its depiction of its female characters as strong and unhampered, paving the way for the likes of Girls and
Fleabag.
But a lot has changed since Candace was running around Manhattan in her Manolos. After finding fame and
success through the show, Bushnell married professional dancer Charles Askegard, who was 10 years her
junior. The couple divorced in 2012 after a decade together, prompting Bushnell to trade sex and the city for
celibacy and the countryside. She moved to her home state of Connecticut and went full pastoral, doing
little else other than riding horses, walking her dogs – poodles named Pepper and Prancer – and writing.
But after four years, she became restless and decided it was time to give Manhattan and, well, sex, another
go. This is the where her new memoir, Is There Still Sex in the City?, picks up and is the reason she’s talking
to me today. The sex itself might be more on the discrete side, but talk of viagra (“the price men pay for
youth”) and oral sex (“some women don’t like it”) is enough to conjure up an image of Bushnell and her girl
gang getting candid at cocktail hour.
“I never really thought about my fifties that much,” says Bushnell, now 60, over the phone from New York,
her dogs barking in the background. “Suddenly you’re not a demographic and you realise you’re kind of
invisible. You don’t see many middle-aged women out there doing things. It’s like society is telling you to
disappear, but this is not a group of women that’s going to disappear.” Why not? “How old are you?”
Bushnell retorts. It’s only a few minutes into our conversation. I tell her I’m 25. “OK, so you have no clue.”
From left: Cynthia Nixon, Kristin
Davis, Sarah Jessica Parker and Kim
Cattrall in ‘Sex and the City’ (Getty)Bushnell is confident. As we speak, she rattles off opinions with pace, often ending sentences by quipping
“OK?” with such assurance that it sounds more like an exclamation than a question. There’s a lot of